Manjaro 16.06 - first preview released

It took us three months to prepare this first preview of our upcoming stable release we call Daniella.

The Xfce edition remains our flagship offering and has received the attention it deserves. Few can claim to offer such a polished, integrated and leading-edge Xfce experience. We ship Xfce 4.12 with this release of Manjaro. We mainly focused on polishing the user experience on the desktop and window manager, and on updating some components to take advantage of newly available technologies such as switching to a new theme called Maia, we already using for our KDE edition.

Our KDE edition continues to deliver this powerful, mature and feature-rich desktop environment with a unique look-and-feel, and with the perks of Manjaro’s latest tools. We ship now Plasma 5.5 desktop in combination with the latest KDE-Apps 15.12. It was a huge step to get it all playing together smoothly and to give the user experience the same feeling as our KDE4 editions of the past.

Kernel 4.4 LTS is used for this release, such as the latest drivers available to date. Relative to the last installation media release, our tools have been improved and polished.

The Manjaro Settings Manager now provides an easy-to-use graphical interface for installing and removing the many series of kernels we offer. Manjaro’s selection of readily available kernels remains the most extensive of all Linux distribution we know of. At the time of this 16.06-pre1 release, twelve kernel-series are available directly from our binary repositories, ranging from the mature & rock-solid 3.10 series to the latest 4.5 release. Such a wide array of available kernel options results in extensive hardware support, getting the most out of your system for you, be it old or new. We also created a kcm module to integrate Manjaro Settings Manager seamlessly into System-Settings of Plasma 5.

With Pamac 3.2 we have made our graphical package manager use the full power of Pacman/ALPM 5.0 release. The updater now support selecting which packages you want to install, transaction functions are now in a library, a custom download function for more control like a longer timeout for slow connection and a better download cancellation is now used, plus we now support the new hooks feature of Pacman.

So please test this release thru and thru and let us know what you think about this preview of Daniella.